iDosing is the made up internet craze where teenagers download digital drugs in the form of MP3 sound files and get high. Or something. I'm not making it up - the Sun and the Mail have reported it. Google News shows a time stamp of an hour earlier for The Mail's story.

Now, if you want to understand how journalism works, compare and contrast ...

A teenager high on iDosing

Videos on YouTube

The Mail

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out and leaping up in fear, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress.

The Sun

Videos posted on YouTube show a young girl freaking out, a teenager shaking violently and a young boy in extreme distress as they listen to the sounds.

Flocking kids

The Mail

But there has been such alarm in the U.S. that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.

‘Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places, spokesman Mark Woodward said.

The Sun

There has been such alarm in the US that the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has issued a warning to children not to do it.

Spokesman Mark Woodward said: "Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places."

News9.com from a few days ago

"Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places," said OBNDD spokesperson Mark Woodward.

A willingness to experiment

The Mail

He added that parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

The Sun

He added parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, as iDosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

Newson6.com from a few days ago

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said parental awareness is key to preventing future problems, since I-dosing could indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs.

Schools in Mustang

The Mail

Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads.

The Sun

Schools in the Mustang area recently sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several students reported experiencing physiological effects after listening to the downloads.

Newson6.com from a few days ago

Recently Mustang Public Schools sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads.

A ship's horn

The Mail

some sound like a ship’s horn being repeated again and again whilst others are more abrasive and resemble cheap synthesizers being played very fast.

The Sun

Some sound like a ship's horn being repeated again and again whilst others are more abrasive and resemble cheap synthesizers being played very fast.

Binaural beats

The Mail

Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: 'Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

The Sun

Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: "Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

NPR.org from a few days ago

Dr. HELANE WAHBEH (Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher, Oregon Health and Science University): ... Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.

Not similar to cocaine or ecstasy

The Mail

‘But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head.’

But Dr Wahbeh denied there was any possibility that someone could experience similar effects to cocaine or ecstasy.

She said: 'We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to.’

The Sun

"When you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head."

But Dr Wahbeh denied there was any possibility that someone could experience similar effects to cocaine or ecstasy.

She said: "We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to."

From npr.org a few days ago

But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head. ...

NORRIS [interviewer]: Now, based on your research, is it possible that listening to these tracks might lead someone to experience something tantamount to the effects of taking cocaine or ecstasy or even Viagra?

Dr. WAHBEH: We did a small controlled study with four people, and we did not see any brain wave activity shifting to match the binaural beat that people were listening to.

Two iDosings, please.

There have been several attempts to work out how many people are paying to access the Times website now its gone behind a paywall. My estimate is: 46,154 a day. Update: Tom Whitwell, assistant editor of the Times, says in the comments below that this figure "*spectacularly* underestimates" the actual number of visitors to the new site.

Restricted

To work this out, I looked at how many people commented on two similar stories - one on the Times site (now paywalled) and one on the Guardian site. As you can see below, from screenshots captured at 1.45pm yesterday, the Times had had 4 comments in almost exactly 2 hours. The Guardian, on its similar but slightly later story, had had 117 comments in 90 minutes.

So if we take the number of readers of the Guardian's website - 1.8 million a day according to the most recent ABCes - multiply that by 4/117 (the ratio of comments on each story) and then multiply that by 90/120 (to allow for the fact that the Times story had been online longer) we get:

1,800,000 x (4/117) x (90/120) = 46,154 readers.

Comparing Guardian and Times comment numbers on similar stories

Some assumptions ...

Obviously, there are a bunch of assumptions built into here, so 46,154 has a somewhat spurious level of accuracy.

Propensity to comment

It's probably not true that the same proportion of readers comment on Times stories as Guardian ones. Finding comparable data was hard, however, as the Times seems to have removed the comments from all its old pre-paywall stories, so I couldn't see how many comments Times stories got pre-paywall compared to the Guardian.

Growth of comments over time

The number of comments probably doesn't grow in a linear way over time - but comparing stories after 90 minutes and 2 hours seems close enough.

Comment bait

The stories aren't exactly the same so may not have motivated people to comment in the same proportions.

But you'd be surprised how hard it is to find stories on newspaper sites with the same sort of angle published at the same sort of time and which allow comments. These were the most comparable stories I could find.

And it's not as if other Times stories have loads of comments, as this screenshot of the homepage at 5.10pm yesterday shows - after 3 hours there are only 4 comments about Joe Cole signing for Liverpool and just 6 comments after 3hrs 40 mins about Cameron calling the Lockerbie bomber's release "utterly wrong".

Few comments on other stories

Comparing this figure with other estimates

15,000 paying subscribers

This figure of 46,154 is higher than the 15,000 paying subscribers since the paywall went up that Beehivecity claimed over the weekend - but you'd expect this as existing Times+ subscribers (ie those who joined Times+ before the paywall went up) can also access the site. They will count towards daily unique visitors -  but won't count as extra paying subscribers.

I can't find a figure for Times+ subscribers, but I have this vague memory of about 60,000-odd of those. This story, from October 2009, claims Culture+, a version of TImes+, "has attracted 90,000 active members" (whatever "active members" means).

Either way,  if you subscribe to The Times newspaper 7 days a week, you get free access to the websites. So all this would explain why there are more than 15,000 daily viewers of The Times paywalled sites - because  people are getting it free as part of their other subscription packages.

2/3 drop

The FT, on the other hand, reported at the weekend that:

Visits to The Times’ website have dropped by two-thirds in the weeks since News International, the media group controlled by Rupert Murdoch, began to implement its paywall strategy, according to new data.

However, the decline has been gentler than the 90 per cent fall in traffic some researchers expected.

Now, 1.2 million readers used Times Online a day according to the last ABCes before it pulled out - so if its traffic had dropped by 90% it would be looking at 120,000 a day.

But even this figures sound too high to me, knowing what else we know. And Hitwise's figures seem a bit odd - the last lot in particular failed to distinguish between home page traffic and those that gone any further beyond the paywall.

So what do you think? I wrote once that, if anyone can charge for content, Murdoch can. But maybe even he can't ...

Photo credit

The Sun decided last week to run a story about the false rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard:

SEX slurs claiming England's World Cup hopes were undermined by a player's fling with a teenage girl are a sick HOAX, The Sun can reveal.

Thousands of fans have received texts and emails saying captain Steven Gerrard had got wife Alex Curran's 16-year-old sister pregnant.

But the lies are blown apart by one crucial fact - model Alex, 27, does not even HAVE a sister.

(I love the justification here for running a story about a rumour: people are receiving texts and emails. Makes it sound link some sort of conspiracy as opposed to people just emailing their friends ...)

Anyway, I don't know what Gerrard's lawyers made of this story but they might want to have a word with Google. If you get as far as typing Steven Gerrard into Google News, the auto complete function throws up this list ...

Google's autocomplete for "Steven Gerrard"

Unlike the Sun's story, the list isn't peppered with provisos that none of this is true.

I usually try to avoid any discussion about the difference between blogging and journalism (it's less painful to debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin).

But in Labour MP Tom Harris's defence of newspaper paywalls, he draws a distinction, arguing that blogs are:

"amateur affairs, offering plenty of subjective opinion and the occasional interesting fact, spun in a particular direction."

Which made me laugh. Substitute "professional" for "amateur" and you surely have the description of many newspapers ...

I was invited to a preview of the Times / Sunday Times paywall last night, which revealed some exciting things they're planning. In between starting this blog post and finishing it, the new sites went live at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/ and http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/.

The launch threw up a number of questions - which no doubt they'll be mulling over and working on. The biggest one for me is why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects?

What's on offer?

The plan is to replace the current site - timesonline.co.uk - with two new sites, one for The Times and one for The Sunday Times.

£2 a week (or £1 for an individual day) buys you access to both sites. There isn't an option to get just one site.

The Times proposition

New homepage for The Times

The Times won't try to be a news wire - it'll be offering fewer stories on its home page than most online newspapers with the aim being to enhance those stories.

Alongside the news / business / sport it will have opinion, arts and life sections.

Without the need to chase search engine traffic or page views for advertisers, the idea of covering fewer stories but in a better way sounds appealing.

Here's an article, for instance, with an information graphic and tabs to let you explore the history and different aspects of the story without leaving the page. This package of content is brilliant - it works much better as an experience than lists of related articles or auto-generated tag pages.

Times article with infographic and tabs

The Sunday Times proposition

New Sunday Times homepage

The Sunday Times site will look very different to the Times's. It will have the sections people know from the paper. So, again there is news, sport and  business - but also culture, style, travel, In Gear and the magazine.

The site won't be updated much during the week - though the aim is still for it to function as a 7-days-a-week site.

But instead of trying to compete with the Times sites for news, it will offer readers the ability to browse and explore Sunday's content over the week, concentrating on galleries, videos and interactive graphics. Here's a gallery - you don't really get a sense of it from the screenshot but there was a lot of interactivity on the Sunday Times site:

Sunday Times gallery

Why two websites?

The decision to replace the current timesonline.co.uk site with two brands and two websites - thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk - has obviously meant some thinking about how they work together.

They seem clear enough that they are two products - a daily news site and a site that you're meant to browse all week.

But it was interesting that the reasons they talked about for this were the different editorial teams, the "different but overlapping audiences", the different values of the newspapers, and the different reasons why people buy the Sunday paper vs the weekday paper.

I get all that for print products that are published on different days.

I'm just not sure why this needs to translate into two different websites that aren't physical products and can be accessed easily on the same day ...

The Tuesday question

Take a Tuesday when I'm reading the online Times Arts section to decide what film or play to watch.

If I want to use the Sunday Times interactive culture tool (which looked great and even lets you remote control your Sky+ box) to explore reviews and book tickets then I need to go to a physically different website and browse to this tool. There's not even going to be a link to it. I don't get why they don't just make the tool available on the Times site as well ...

Or if I'm reading news about the BP oil spill on Tuesday on the Times site. How will I know there is an amazing interactive infographic on the Sunday Times site explaining what has happened so far?

Where there's overlap in subject matters, the content and functionality are split  across two sites. And there's no eaasy way for users to find out what's on the other site without going there and looking - which surely people aren't going to bother to do on a regular basis on the off chance there might be something there?

The Sunday question

The Times site isn't going to get updated much on a Sunday, unless there's breaking news. So it will be interesting to see how it covers Saturday's news when they do get round to writing about it - particularly sport.

Take the Champion's League final last Saturday. In print, the Times would have analysed it in its Monday paper edition, and the Sunday Times would have done a match report.

Online I'm not sure what will happen. It doesn't seem to make sense to split this content across two websites, though. Will the Times site publish a match report online, or will this just be on the Sunday Times site? Having two match reports seems a bit odd. But reading the analysis on the Times without being able to easily get to the Sunday Times match report seems odd too.

Should they let people subscribe to just one site?

I like the different approach they are taking on the two sites. And having them as separate sites might make sense if they were comptitors or if you could subscribe to just one - but you can't.

Given you have to take both, when they have overlapping content, why physically separate it? Why not just have one sport section or one culture section where you can see the differing Times / Sunday Times take on things?

It strikes me that there is either sufficient distinction in the audience for the two brands that you let users subscribe to just one site. Or the audiences cross over so much that you combine the two sites in one and think about what makes most sense from the user's point of view.

Forcing people to subscribe to both sites but keeping them entirely separate, with no cross linking, seems a bit odd.

How will people access the site?

There were, as you can imagine, several questions about how the paywall will work in practice.

Only two pages will be accessible if you're not logged in - the homepage of the The Times site and the homepage of the Sunday Times site. If you click on a link to a story, a box appears telling you to sign up or log in.

Here's the box:

The Times paywall: no further!

And here's what you see if you click to sign up. (As I've said before about paywalls, I think they're going to have to get this to work a LOT harder):

The sign up page needs to work harder

If you clicked on a deep link to a story, you are redirected to the homepage where the box appears (I think this sounds odder than it will be in practice although the page load speeds are a bit slow at the moment. To see it in action, click here (a deep link) and then wait for the overlay to appear ....). If you log in / sign up you are then redirected to the URL you were after.

The same is true of search engines, too - so Google won't be able to access the pages, which won't appear in Google's news or web search - with one small caveat. Google will be able to see URLs that are shown on the homepage but as it sees a login box if it tries to crawl the URL, I'm not 100% clear what happens then.

What are you getting?

There will be a 4 week period after the launch of these two new sites (a launch which was said to be "very imminent" - ie today!) where the current site and the new sites will exist together. Last night I thought they said there wouldn't be a paywall so the new sites will be fully accessible so people could see what the sites were all about. But you can't get past the homepages at the moment.

All three sites will be updated, and you'll be able to browse around the new Times and Sunday Times sites to see what they look like.

After 4 weeks, the paywall goes up and you'll need to pay to access the new sites. At that point, the old site will stop being updated. Confused? We were a bit!

As things stand, this means there will be the paid-for Times Archive, spanning 1785 to 1985. Then the current timesonline site will sit on the internet, not being updated from the end of June but with old stories still accessible. And the two new sites will run behind a paywall for any new content.

Although this seems a bit weird, I don't suppose it matters too much ...

Marketing the sites

What will be interesting to see is how they encourage people to sign up once the paywall is there - how will they show people what they'll be getting if they sign up?

There was no discussion this evening of tours or free trials or anything. I'm sure they've got something planned.

To sum up ...

Overall, they seemed to have some interesting views on what each product is and how it will work.

And I do understand the distinction they were trying to draw between a daily news site on the one hand and a weekly site on the other.

But when the daily news site is actually only 6 days a week, and covers much of the same subject matter as the weekly site ... and when they're offered as part of the same subscription with no option to just get one ... that's when I start to get a bit confused.

Have they projected their internal structure onto the websites they offer customers at the expense of the user experience?

Or do they have a much better grasp of what their audiences want on different days and in different modes?

Only time - and The Timeses - will tell (< sorry).

The Times and Sunday Times have made a video about their new paywalled sites. Here it is (roll your mouse over it to make the play button appear).

Here's what I think about the paywall plans.

Google says it has "taken action" and no longer trusts links from a major UK newspaper group - apparently referring to the Daily Express website.

Express website

In April, an Express Group email was made public offering links in online "SEO editorials" from £1,000 - with the aim of improving search engine rankings.

Such paid links are against Google's "terms of service" - and the Express (and OK) site initially suffered a page rank penalty in Google's toolbar (ie not much of a punishment at all).

"We saw that"

But Google has now gone further, according to an interview with Google's search quality team at Digital Inspiration. Question 9 asks about newspapers selling links on their sites to companies wanting to rank better in search engines. In reply, Google's Matt Cutts says:

If you’re talking about the recent incident in the UK, we saw that. Google’s quality guidelines are clear on this point: paid links shouldn’t pass PageRank.

Whether the paid links are in an “advertorial” or somewhere else on the page, that would violate our quality guidelines and Google would take action on those violations, both so that the link buyers wouldn’t benefit and so that the link sellers wouldn’t be trusted in the future by Google.

The only incident I know of recently in the UK is the Express case - so Matt Cutts appears to be saying the Express site (and presumably OK site) are no longer trusted by Google's algorithm.

Whatever your views on outing SEO tactics, this would be a fairly severe reaction to not using nofollow on paid links if carried forward. Thanks to Jon Hudghton (his blog's here) for spotting the info.

Mobile versions of websites - what a train crash they often are. As I write this, at 10.30pm on Monday night, neither the BBC nor Guardian mobile websites are mentioning that Gordon Brown has promised to resign ... a story that their web news pages are unsurprising leading with - and have been doing so for several hours.

I'm sure it's hard to implement a mobile version of a website - with ITV's mobile site particularly demonstrating why they're often rubbish.

But I expected rather more of the BBC and the Guardian. In fact, if you've been using their mobile sites for the last few days, you'd have been under the impression that there has been little news about the election to report...

The Guardian

Here's the Guardian's mobile version tonight - no mention of Gordon Brown quitting.

Guardian: no sign of resigning PMs

And here's its web version - leading with the news.

Guardian web: Brown's resigned

The BBC

Here's the BBC mobile site on Sunday morning - literally no mention of the election whatsoever. It's been like this for days...

BBC mobile: any election news?

And here's the web version of its news pages at the same time. Oh, there's an election.

BBC web: there's an election!

And tonight, again, there is no mention of the election and no mention of Brown's resignation on the mobile version of the BBC's news pages:

Brown has resigned, I'm sure ...

Back to the drawing board, please.

I'm not quite sure why the Sun runs Sun Vote as it just ignores it (EG when its readers aren't that fussed over a hung parliament).

But its own on-site poll from last night about who won the debate (and unlike other sites, these aren't easy polls to vote in - you have to go through a lengthy sign-up process)  reveals that Clegg won. Asked "Who won the 3rd debate", Sun readers voted:

• Nick Clegg 50.9%
• David Cameron 29.6%
• Gordon Brown 18.6%

Not sure how this squares with Clegg being toast as its main story says ...

Sun Vote results

Clegg: wins 3rd debate

Main story

Clegg: toast

What a surprise. Not.

The Salisbury Journal has revealed that its "dog bumps nose" story (no, I'm not making this up) has been read by 130,000 people - making it the paper's most read article ever. You'll realise how extraordinary this is when you read the story ...

Original story

Here's what it said ...

POLICE in Ringwood are investigating the circumstances surrounding an injury to a dog’s nose.

A woman was walking her dog and puppy, when her puppy ran off.

Her dog ran after the puppy but collided with a male dog walker and his dog.

The woman's dog received an injury to his nose.

I'm not joking. That really was the original story. All of it.

Follow up story

Wait, there's more - a follow up.

MORE than 130,000 people logged on to view our top story today.

Even Mock the Week star Dara O’Briain tweeted about it.

What’s that, I hear you cry?

Was Cheryl Cole kissing David Beckham in the cathedral?

Nope.

Our most viewed story ever involved a dog, with an injured nose.

At only four sentences long, it probably breaks most records for page impressions per word anywhere on the web.

So, how does it smell? One commentator asked.

The original story now has 53 comments, blaming NuLiebor and immigrants for the problem. They're joking. I think.

Hat tip to Drew Broomhall.